I focus on the impact of globalization between Asia and the U.S. Priors include Mumbai correspondent for The Wall Street Journal where I covered business in India, across sectors, as well as some of the big western companies in India; Staff Writer with Forbes Magazine in New York where I covered Asia and reported stories from Afghanistan, China, Hong Kong, India and Pakistan; and Reuters also in New York. While at Forbes, I won an Overseas Press Club of America award for best business reporting from abroad for a story I did on Maoists in India and their clash with corporate India. I'm currently based in India, where I write about business and development in the neighborhood. You can follow me on Twitter: @mbahree or contact me through e-mail: Megha.Bahree@gmail.com.

Your Beautiful Indian Rug Was Probably Made By Child Labor

If you’ve bought a hand-made Indian rug, it’s quite likely that it was woven by children, and quite often by slave labor, according to a new study by FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

The report, written by Harvard adjunct faculty member Siddharth Kara, documents the supply chain of tainted carpets from the point of production to the point of retail sale in the United States. According to the report, some of the retailers who sell carpets from those exporters and importers include Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, TargetTarget, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and IKEAIKEA, amongst others.

Retailers, when contacted, said they were strictly against all forms of child labor and would look into the issues raised in the report. (You can read their detailed responses below.)

Child labor is an old problem in India as I found out when I was reporting on the topic for a story for Forbes back in 2008. I traveled across the country from Monsanto'sMonsanto's cotton fields in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to the slums of Delhi to sandstone quarries of Rajasthan to the carpet belt near Varanasi. At every place I met children hard at work, picking cotton buds, sticking sparkling stones to picture frames and pen holders, chiseling stone into cobbles and pavers and weaving carpets. Some were as young as five or six while others had spent their adolescence in these jobs, living in extreme poverty and usually away from their families.

So while this is not new, it’s worrying that despite ample scrutiny, child labor is still so prevalent in India.

India’s carpet industry has traditionally been focused in the cities of Bhadohi, Mirzapur, and Varanasi in southeast Uttar Pradesh, the country’s ost populous, and amongst the poorest, state. After years of scrutiny although cases of use of child labor in those areas have dropped, the practice has not ended. Rather, it has shifted to other cities, a few hundred kilometers away, around the three-city area of Shahjahanpur, Badaun, and Hardoi.

An eight-member team of researchers led by Kara found that in this area child labor was rampant, chronic, and almost entirely in deeply rural Muslim villages. The vast majority of the children doing the carpet weaving were females, unlike the rest of the state where where the weavers are usually young boys.

“An astonishing level of outright slavery and child labor for carpet weaving appears to be all but the norm in the region in and around this new carpet belt,” the report said.

Researchers found that entire villages of Muslims were held in severe debt bondage for carpet weaving in rural areas around the cities of Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh and Morena and Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. Muslims also received the lowest average wages of $1.58 for an eight-hour workday–or $0.20 an hour–followed by Hindus of the lowest caste at $1.65 or $0.21 an hour.

Kara’s team also found cases where families sold their children to contractors in exchange for jobs at a carpet factory. The child had to then work off the advance of roughly $40 before parents were promised some share in the income from the child’s labor. However, in all cases the children were subsequently charged fees for living quarters, food and water, medicines, and deductions were also made for errors in the work, the report says. The children reported wages of typically $0.11 an hour–allegedly because they were still paying the dues on their advances. Some or all of these wages were ostensibly sent to the parents, but there was no way to confirm whether this was indeed the case, the report says.

The average advance taken by the bonded laborers who were documented was $85, the highest was for $150, usually to pay for a wedding.

In all cases, the workers reported that they could not leave the carpet-weaving job until they were told that their debts had been repaid but most had little idea as to how much debt they had remaining. The bonded laborers reported dealing with severe restrictions on their movement and alternate employment, working excessive hours, insufficient food and medical care for injuries, and being heavily pressured to work even when ill or injured, according to the report.

Kara’s team conducted this research across nine states, covering areas where 95% of handmade carpets are woven. It found that a minimum of roughly 45% of all workers in India’s hand-made carpet sector suffer from forced labor under Indian law; roughly 37% suffer from forced labor under international law; roughly 28% from bonded labor; roughly 20% from child labor; and roughly 4% from human trafficking. Since India’s carpet sector employs about two million people, Kara suggests that within that workforce there are approximately 900,000 forced laborers and approximately 400,000 child laborers.

The researchers found that many children worked, ate, and slept inside rural carpet shacks, rarely, if ever, stepping out for weeks or months and were often on the receiving end of verbal and physical abuse.

WHAT THE COMPANIES SAY (Their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity):

Crate and Barrel:

“Crate and Barrel is deeply concerned about these allegations. We take them very seriously as they involve a direct violation of our code of conduct and do not support our company values. We are actively investigating these claims and have already reached out to the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. We are also conducting an internal audit of all of our vendors in India.” Ikea:

“IKEA has been sourcing from India for 26 years and is committed to responsible sourcing. We source hand woven carpets from four suppliers in India, however we do not currently source any hand knotted or hand tufted carpets from the country. Today we work with just four suppliers making hand woven carpets in India. These suppliers receive regular un-announced and announced audits by IKEA auditors and third party auditors to check compliance with our code of conduct, IWAY. The four carpet suppliers we work with in India were all audited during the past year and were approved according to IWAY. IWAY includes strict requirements on labour rights, working conditions, safety and environmental protection. It includes a complete ban on forced and bonded labour and child labour and explains how we will always act in the best interests of children. We require all our home furnishing suppliers to be approved according to our code of conduct or they are phased out of our supply chain.”

Williams Sonoma Inc.:

“The conditions described in the report are extremely concerning, intolerable, and in conflict with our corporate values. Williams-Sonoma Inc. has zero tolerance for human trafficking, child or forced labor in our global supply chains. We work diligently to choose the right suppliers and to ensure that they adhere to a strict set of standards, ethics and practices. We have an ongoing approach to auditing our factories on a regular basis. When we learned of the report, we immediately assembled a high-level task force to review the possibility of any of these conditions existing within our rug vendor base. The first step we took was to dispatch our global compliance team to India to conduct additional audits of our rug factories. Thus far we have found no evidence that our factories are implicated in these practices. We will continue to engage with our vendors on this matter.”

Macy’s Inc.:

“Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s will not tolerate human trafficking and slavery in our supply chain. We will quickly investigate any such situations, and take swift and decisive action against any supplier for non-compliance with our policies and standards, resulting in possible termination of the business relationship. We are aware of the report published by the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard and stand ready to investigate any specific allegations of rugs supplied to us that involved slavery or human trafficking in the supply chain. Note that the majority of rugs sold by our company are machine-made — not hand-made. Also note that Macy’s is the only national retailer in the U.S. that offers a collection of hand-made rugs certified by GoodWeave, an international organization that works to ensure rugs made by hand in Nepal and India are free of child labor.”

Neiman Marcus Group:

“Neiman Marcus Group does not import rugs for resale.”

Harvard University’s Kara disagrees and says: “We can confirm that Neiman Marcus sells carpets made in India that are linked to some of the main importers and exporters we documented to have used varying degrees of at least one of the five forms of exploitative labor practices described in the report.”

Target:

“Target has always held itself — and our partners — accountable to the highest standards of ethical business practices. As stated in our Standards of Vendor Engagement, we will not knowingly work with any company that does not comply with our ethical standards.”

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Did you know that the fields were run by Monsanto? Are you suggesting that Monsanto uses slave labor? Monsanto produces cotton seed in India but they have very strict guidlines to ensure that there is no slave labor etc. Did you just throw the Monsanto name in because it is now what people do to excite readers? This is important to see if there is anything valid in your story. If one fact is wrong what else is wrong.

I work at Monsanto and the company has very strict rules about ensuring we don’t have forced labor etc. If you have any evidence that there is forced labor on Monsanto run fields (direct or contracted). You should tell the company know at once. As teh previosu post asked – do you have any evdeience it was a Monsanto field or was that a guess?

I gather what you think you saw in Monsanto fields was not true and even though it has been proven to you, you still use the same incorrect story at least about the Monsanto fields.

Everyone can applaud your efforts to make sure that children (or adults) are not exploited but please get your facts straight otherwise its like shooting with a machine gun into a crowd to kill a fictitious murderer on the loose.

It doesn’t make sense, it is counter-productive and dangerous.

We all have the responsibility to be as correct as we can when we write in the public eye.

Again I know based on my training in the company, if you have real information that children are being exploited by Monsanto operations anywhere in the world, Monsanto would want to know directly so that if it is correct, they would correct it and make people accountable for not following Monsanto policies. Here is a copy of what is on Monsanto’s internal and external web site:

The Monsanto Human Rights Policy, adopted in April 2006, is an important manifestation of the company’s values as described in the Monsanto Pledge. The policy is a mechanism by which we will hold ourselves accountable and demonstrate our commitment to human rights as we conduct our business globally. Monsanto will work to identify and do business with partners who aspire in the conduct of their businesses to ethical standards that are consistent with this policy.

Our Human Rights Policy is guided by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which provides the most widely recognized definition of human rights, and the International Labor Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Monsanto’s policy addresses circumstances unique to farming and the agricultural industry, including seasonal production.

Monsanto’s Human Rights Policy identifies nine elements on which Monsanto will focus its human rights efforts. These nine elements, as included in the Human Rights Employee Guidebook, are:

Child Labor Forced Labor etc etc

…and from what I gather we worked with others outside Monsanto to come up with the content and how to implement this effort in 2006…….so you can see why an almost random observation by someone without a lot of investigation is almost insulting ………………………but if you have any evidence it would good for people who can influence change to have it to correct any issue that violates our pledge

Eliminating Child Labor in India Through a program aimed at reducing child labor, one young woman in the Andhra Pradesh Province of India went from laboring in the fields — work that interfered with her education — to studying nursing and operating a home-based seamstress business that employs other family members. With $575,320 from the Monsanto Fund, the Australian Foundation for the Peoples of Asia, in partnership with the Voluntary Organization of Rural Development Society, an India-based non-governmental organization, supported a residential-based bridge school to help transition children from work in the fields to formal schooling or obtaining a skill. Children from 100 villages have benefited from the program. In addition to promoting awareness to farmers to avoid employing children, the facilities for the students were vastly improved and the kitchen, dining area and dormitories were totally renovated. A significant number of the villages targeted for the program are now acknowledged as Child Labour Free by the Child Labour Department of Andhra Pradesh.

I work with a person who is a Ph.D. and grew up growing her families food and had to choose between weeding the crop and pulling insects off the plant or going to school. The other choice was applying chemcial insecticide BY HAND.

That is a problem with the low efficiency of small holder farmers. Gm crops can and do bring benefits already to small farms (in fact most of the farmers growing Gm crops are small) but it is people spreading false stories about fictious harm from GM crops or Monsanto that is stopping some people in developing countriew from getting the same choices and benefist from the same seed that farmers in Argentiana, the US and even S. Africa for more than 10 years (up to 18 years now).

Again I thank you for your concern but since you keep posting the story from 6 years ago I think you need to get up to date with your facts that weren’t correct 6 years ago

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